Posted
by
Zonk
on Saturday December 30, 2006 @10:48PM
from the exciting-times dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."

Ex MacOSX guys won't fuel Vista - Dell, HP, et al will. People won't even know that there's any alternative, that's why Microsoft will be making their billions. Bullshit that OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon, let alone within the next year. The open source zealots will never go for it, and a lot of people have too much invested in Linux. And how will the Cell processor totally dominate the next top computing list when it's not even worth a mention in the current top computing list?

He then goes on to reiterate much of what's been said every year but never come true, that is the parts that actually made sense. I'm surprised that he didn't say "2007 is the year for the Open Solaris desktop".

"'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop?"

I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux. Or Mac OS X. Or BeOS. Or Amiga.

Face it, Windows is the defacto standard and will be for many, many years. Until businesses change (from running Windows) every other operating system ever created will be second fiddle to the Microsoft monopoly. You know what? Who cares? Do you think Porsche executives stay up late at night thinking "Jesus Christ, Ford has really got us by the balls. How the fuck are we going to compete againt the new Escort?"

I don't care about Microsoft and what they're doing. If it wasn't for their stranglehold on the computing industry, they'd be 10 years behind the technological curve. Natch. They ARE 10 years behind the curve. They just (currently) have the money right NOW to stay relevant.

It's not that MS has the money to stay relevant. They have the market share to stay relevant. That may change in the future. The question is...how far in the future.

What Microsoft has are products that are relevant to the masses. Mac OS is not relevant to the masses because not everyone wants, can afford, or is willing to pay for, an Apple desktop. Solaris is not relevant to the masses because it's not pretty and a bother for a non-sysadmin to configure and maintain. Linux is not relevant to the masses because F/OSS designers are nerds creating software that's relevant to them.

Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population. If an above-average competitor comes along at this point and targets those same masses, upsetting Microsoft will be easy; but right now I see no evidence that such an event is likely. Google is too nerdy to do it, IBM doesn't care about desktops anymore, it could only happen at Apple with Jobs gone and with Jobs gone Apple would crumble, and Sun is just too much of a mess.

"By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community."

This statement from TFA completely misses the point, but not only in the way you explain. Thing is, OpenSolaris is a kernel, just like Linux; it isn't an entire OS. The 'Linux community' is only in a small part the 'Linux kernel community'; most projects in the FOSS world are kernel-agnostic. You can run GNOME on a Linux, BSD or OpenSolaris kernel, for example. So even if OpenSolaris does become a more popular kernel than Linux, very little will change in the FOSS world. Microsoft would have a hell of a time replacing their kernel; a 'Linux distro' can fairly easily do so (for example, Nexenta is Ubuntu running on OpenSolaris).

However, even after focusing only on the kernel, I seriously doubt OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon. There is quite a lot of (code) investment in Linux, e.g. drivers, which would need to be ported (and licensing issues sorted out, but perhaps Sun will GPL OpenSolaris as rumors claim). Equally importantly, distros are used to using Linux. While OpenSolaris has some advantages, I can't see how any of them is reason enough to switch over. Still, choice is always good, perhaps both kernels have a place.

The desktop tools are fully as useable as Microsoft's. More so, I'd say. Even GNOME is, with their habit of entirely removing everything that's unnecessary for more than 80% of the users.

The major remaining issues for Linux superiority are hardware support and games. I've got TuxRacer and Globulation 2, though, and set up my wireless card in three easy step (the other fifteen were fiendishly difficult).

After that, the remaining issues are Internet access and speed (Linux isn't good for slow connections), specific applications (if you have ten years' data for ARCview, you're staying with the platforms they support), and unfamiliarity with Linux.

Take a similar example: Apple produces a product that's more polished and better in many ways than Linux, better in most ways than Microsoft, and still has less than 10% market share. Why? Nothing technical, just economic and psychological.

I'm guessing you mean the end of civilization in America not culture, because even with the end of civilization in America I intend to stay cultured. My guns, dogs, and library will hopefully ensure that.

By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure

Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?

the core provisions in the community development license

Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open

and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
My prediction: OpenSolaris is going to be a dud.

Get real - Linux tracing capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to DTrace. Just because something wasn't developed by the "Linux community" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean it is worthless. ZFS is a major evolutionary step forward for file systems. Again, just because it wasn't born and raised as a sourceforge project doesn't mean it must be crap. Take off the blinders, zealot. Great technology knows no religion, it can come from anywhere. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al, are not staffed by idiots (well, at least
not in the engineering ranks). Just because they work for "the man" doesn't make their contributions to the field of software any less relevant or useful. Judge the tools by their merits, ignore the religion.

Whether or not OpenSolaris "takes over" in 2007 remains to be seen, but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.

Linux has no good filesystems. You are stuck trying to pick which pig has the nicest lipstick on. And the two nicest made up pigs are both from corporations giving up their unixes and opening their filesystems up. If not for IBM and SGI, linux still would have no usable filesystems at all.And linux has nothing that in any way comes anywhere even close to dtrace. I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on d

Tell me, can you sit down when you talk out of your ass?"Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?"

Yep. Ever hear of NFS? NIS?More to the point, take a look at the OpenSolaris community and tell me what's wrong with the organisational structure. It's very similar to the standard open-source structure, except that it addresses some of the problems that have cropped up in that model (fragmentation, dead projects).

In what way were Sun NFS and NIS big open source successes? I mean, apart from the fact that NFS and NIS absolutely suck as technologies, Sun released their source long after other people had created their own, independent implementations.

Complete system probes are something completely new in the world of computing,

Yes, and that statement in itself makes them suspect. The UNIX philosophy has always been to provide minimal "good enough" solutions for clearly defined needs, not co

Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.

What Linux already has is mindshare. It is a "good enough" Microsoft alternative that works now. Sure, DTrace is good. Great, even. But most people wouldn't know how to take advantage of it. Most people putting together a mail server or web server simply don't need it. A

How many trite phrases can you fit in one blog post? "structural convergence" "Web 2" "SOA" "Googlemania" "YouTube"

OK, Here's my set of predictions.

Lots of folks will make money -- in old realiable and new creative ways. Some of them will go to jail for it eventually. Most will not.

Transcoding video is the killer app for multicore and beyond. The studios aren't coming to market fast enough to deliver the universally playable content that users want, and users are ready to pay thousands for a pc that converts the media they already have.

Linux and OSX will continue to take share from the Borg, slowly. More slowly than they should.

Vista will be revealed to be as buggy and spyware prone as every other MS OS, for the same reason -- it's developed by the same braindamaged marketdroids who brought us all the others. Microsoft is lucky most of us have no other choice.

A great many flackalysts will comment on the invincibility of Vista, Microsoft, IBM, Sun and every other major vendor, and their paid commentary is worth exactly what the company's glossy fliers are -- not even useful as toilet paper.

The winner in the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD wars will be... Monitor makers. Your powerpoint never looked so lovely as it does in 1080p.

You're both wrong. Or more precisely, you're both wrong in the wider scope of "HPC." HPC is much more than machoflops. Cell may indeed dominate the Top 500 in 2007, but that's a useless list for people doing serious supercomputing work. It's one datapoint on a very complex computational surface.

Cell and GPGPU will remain niche technologies for one very simple reason: they're insanely difficult to program. HPC users are less and less willing

We'll know when Intel has got it when they realize the infinite possible permutations of special purpose cores on one chip means a great deal of marketing advantage.

Of course that solution includes a great deal more compiler complexity than even massively parallel GPGPUs. It is unfortunate that HPC is going to have this shakeout in programmers who know what they're doing, vs template geeks. Unfortunate for the template geeks, that is. Real programmers code with the tools at hand an

Ok, this post is going to be off topic. It's ok. I can afford the karma.

You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.

I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ [mosesmi.org] (who could use a new webmaster, btw).

I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the idea

1. Microsoft will make billions on vista. duh.
2. Itanic is still dead. Wow. What a revelation.
3. Cell takes over HPC. Not gonna happen. See GPGPU for why.
4. Slowaris wins out over linux. Literally when pigs fly.

The funny thing is you can get a much more realistic set of predictions by inverting many of these.

Microsoft will hit financial/stock trouble as Vista flops, with businesses not buying it and the public not keen on the upgrades/lack of wow.

Itanic get killed, zeroed and deleted from the Intel history books

Cell is on life support by the end of the year, off the back of poor PS3 sales, poor yields, and nobody wanting to fight to program the damn thing.

Linux comes of age as the disto crowd final package a version sensibly. Sun is on life support off the back of poor business decisions.

GPGPU vs Cell: Right now you can buy off the shelf a pair of GPGPU cards that slot into one motherboard. That gives you 1024 math units, at least six GPU units, and the whole thing drives off of one single, dual or quad-core cpu, that fits in 4u. Sure they don't do dual precision yet, but that requirement is not universal. IBM may have some good stuff with the Cell, but it won't be 2007 when they begin to compete with that, and who knows what's in the graphics card manufacturers pipeline? They're a typi

Specifically Nevada build 54 and Nexenta alpha 5. They have some interesting technologies (specificaly ZFS, which is interesting, and Zones, which is a bit lower overhead than virtualization, but not as flexible (everything still goes through the Solaris kernel)). Nexenta I honestly thought was a cool concept, and executed quite well, Debian package management and GNU software that is clearly better than some of the Sun basic utilities (and much less Java inclined...), offering the benefits that Solaris does have to offer...

Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.

Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.

DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.

Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.

So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve

OK, I'm a hardcore, fulltime, Solaris admin. I've been heavily involved in rolling out Solaris 10 to the production systems at a major oil corporation. In other words, I'm a bit biased.:-)

Be that as it may, let me make a few comments.

1) Nevada is development code, not release. If there aren't bugs in your dev. code, then you're either the finest programmer since about 1960, or you're not doing anything.2) OpenSolaris in general is not the place to go for release code; It's the community work, warts and all. If you want a production OS, you use Solaris10.3) Having said that, let me also add that Solaris10 is documented. Heavily. Coherently. Completely. HPUX and AIX are close, Linux isn't even an also-ran in the documentation realm.

So let me talk about some of the good and bad we're seeing with Solaris10 in the real world.

Let me start by stating that dtrace rocks. Most admins don't write scripts in it, as you suspect--however, they do download them from programmers who give back to the community. Similarly, zones rock too--companies are using them to compartmentalise their environments (for example: one database instance per zone), which makes migration between machines a trivial process. BrandZ is an interesting offshoot, but is likely to be less important for users than for developers.

Hardware support (specifically non-Sun, x86/x64) hardware support is amazing. Really, Solaris will work on anything!!!

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

OK, let's come clean. Hardware support is rapidly um... sucking less. It's still nowhere close to the Linux ballpark, and probably won't be for at least three years. That's not surprising from a company that continually tried to kill off their X86 offering for several years, before rather suddenly committing to it. Let me come back to this in a moment.

I'll readily admit that the anti-Linux sentiment is very strong in the (Open)Solaris world, but you should understand where some of the frustration comes from. Daily (hourly!), the various newsgroups and discussion forums receive posts that come across as, "I can do THIS in Linux, but I can't in Solaris. Why does Solaris suck so badly?!" The answer is usually that Linux has some nonstandard (and more than occasionally undocumented) extensions to standard Unix tools. In other words, this 'thing' will not work in Irix, AIX, HP-UX, *BSD, OSF/1, OS X, or any other Unix variant--only in Linux. Furthermore, if that behaviour is really necessary (it rarely is), then the tool is probably available as a source or binary download to anyone interested.

I can't comment on ACPI, other than to state that I have never used a computer for any length of time, running any OS, that did power management properly. That includes Linux (RHEL3 and older), Windows (XP and earlier), or Solaris (10, etc.)

Don't get me wrong here--Solaris on commodity hardware still has a ways to go. However, Solaris on Sun hardware (either SPARC or X64) is the best thing going in computing right now. For those two reasons, OpenSolaris really does have the potential to take the world by storm next year. The community has been presented with both a challenge (make this a true commodity-hardware OS), and a clear goal (behaving like Solaris10 on Sun gear). Furthermore, since Sun is feeding contributions back from OpenSolaris into Solaris, the 'official' OS will continue to get better.

In other words, the OpenSolaris community will thrive because there's an intriguing challenge facing them, and a clear reward as a result.

Oh well, thanks !The only contributor until now who might have actually *seen* OpenSolaris. Compared to all those fanboys of whatever, who might be right, but don't know what the're talking about w.r.t OpenSolaris.OpenSolaris can be open Solaris, but it could as well be Linux with a different kernel: SunOS.Sorry, RMS, GNU/Linux without Linux; that would be GNU/SunOS. No, not yet GNU/Hurd; not in 2007. That's my prognosis, by the way;).No need to sneeze at that kernel, running your favourite Gnome/KDE/wm/XF

Hey, I have seen and played with OpenSolaris, so that makes at least two, just I'm less enthusiastic than he is... Though my short run with the distributions may not be long enough to fairly evaluate the community, but it doesn't stop me from trying...That vision of Solaris kernel coupled with GNU userland, Xorg, traditional stuff found in a linux desktop is largely achieved by Nexenta. If you want a taste, I'd try Nexenta's offering, it really is interesting and left me with a much better taste in my mout

Fair enough about the development code, but was playing with it largely because the support for hardware isn't close in Sol10U3 for my evaluation hardware, so I pretty much had to do Nevada. I won't complain too loudly about instability with Nevada and derivatives stability, but it was the option I could exercise, and it seemed stable, just lacking low level support to do nice things in a desktop context. Nevada build 54 was honestly much much similar to the Solaris I remember, which isn't that exciting (

Vista will make billions. XP would continue to make billions if Vista were never created. Considering how little new features Vista introduces, its development has been a complete waste. Nobody will shell out the money to "upgrade" to it. They'll only spend money that would otherwise have been spent on XP. I don't know the business term to describe this, but if a new product only cannibalizes sales of an existing product and doesn't bring in new sales, whatever money was spent developing it was completely w

1. Apple will release several cool new products.
2. A Windows security hole will be discovered.
3. Internet use will increase.
4. Zune will not overtake the iPod.
5. The prices of hard drives and DRAM will continue to fall.
6. The circulation of print newspapers will continue to decline.
7. Interest groups will raise a stink over violence in video games.
8. A major technology company will introduce a new form of DRM...which will fail miserably.
9. The next version of Mac OS X will be visually and technically superior to Windows Vista.
10. Duke Nukem Forever will not be released.

I know I'm going out on a limb here, but trust me. I'm a science fiction writer. I can see the future!

1) Billions off vista? Yeah, right. Public beta is expected to start at the end of January, turnaround to the market isn't THAT fast (remember NT4 SP3? Remember W2000 SP4? Remember Windows XP SP1?)

2) Itanium?

3) Except for the fact that SUPERcomputers are not specced, ordered and build overnight, more like 18-24 month timeframe for rollout and then some for full capacity if we are talking about serious ones. Also CELL is not the answer, ask Cray.

4) Assuming that ___OPEN!!! IT'S OPEN NOW___ Solaris actually manages to get any exposure at all this is absolutely unlikely to happen in an envorement that is supercharged with egos and religious evangelists/fanatics that spend their lives defending their indentation style or plan source control system migration for 18 months ahead.

Of course we could be had - last three paragraphs hives off a hint that this could be a very ultrasubtle attempt at humor. In a failed way of sense.

In short - most stupid article seen on/. within last month. I just felt obliged to comment.

By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.

To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.

All of these next year IT prevision lists make me wonder, if we magically went back to one year ago and tried making a list of IT predictions for 2006, what would be in this list? Because I've been thinking about it and although I must have went through 80% at least of all Slashdot summaries in 2006 I can't think of anything but the Gootube merge and the Reiser story (but that one can't be put in a prediction list since it was obviously unpredictable)

Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.

Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.

You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.

That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.

Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.

The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.

If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.

If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.

What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned?

What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned?

Because open-source programmers are often hobbyists who would rather cobble together one more mail client that will never have a measurable market share. One thing that the anti-Microsoft zealots need to realize is that the open-source crowd aren't in it to win, they're just in it for the code, and so relying on them to conquer the world is wrongheaded, if not downright stupid.

Ever tried reverse engineering the MAPI "protocol"? It's all serialized COM objects being shunted across the network. The client and the server are tied, making any attempts at reverese engineering an exercise in feature-chasing frustration.

There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.

Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.

Try using email instead of the strangeness that is MS Exchange. I'm possibly biased becuase my experiences with MS Exchange were unpleasant and ridiculously time consuming and it was entirely unsuited to 24 hour operation in a small site with only one mail server (you have to shut it down to back up the mail!). A bare metal restore drill showed just how flakey and fragile the whole thing used to be and possibly still is. The sendmail config fil

It wasnt a joke. Exchange does what it does very well. The problem is, too many people think you can go at Microsoft's enterprise tools with ease because they managed to master Windows. Exchange is a not a trivial tool, and your commments suggest you know little about it. If you really believe you have to bring down a server to back up the mail, you should just back away slowly and call someone who knows what they are doing.

If you really believe you have to bring down a server to back up the mail, you should just back away slowly and call someone who knows what they are doing....No one familiar with Exchange needs a registry hack. Nobody.

Nasty and showing ignorance of earlier releases to pretend it didn't happen! I should add that it was Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 - you did have to do such things, especially to get it to work with the required third party packages to make it functional like antivirus and other useful stuff like fa

Forgot to point that out above - sorry guys. Used MS Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 on NT4 at three sites and a cold spare - horrible and glad to be able to spend more time caring for the *nix machines instead of the time consuming GUI driven over VNC things.

Perhaps it's good now - but is it really a shining example of something to emulate as hinted at above. I doubted it and wrote as such.

I was using an earlier version (prior to 2003) which had some ridiculous features like being an open relay by default unless you had the right patch (showed up in testing). It's good to hear that some of the basic features expected in mail sever software have been implemented in MS Exchange. One of the biggest problems I had was people trying to get urgent emails out at 3am when backups occured - shifting the time would just have resulted in the same problem at other times. The biggest problem was memory

Hmmm, I have been using Linux desktop since Sep 2004.At this time my work machine, home machine, my kids' desktop and school notebooks are all Linux (pclinuxos 0.92)I assume you don't use Linux as your desktop, have not even tried one in the last couple years, hence the total crap comment.The reality is, Linux desktop is as functional and user friendly as the Windows desktop for most mainstream applications.As an added bonus, you're virtually immune to virus, adware, data corruption, system hangs, etc.You also have realtime access to many high quality applications.And should you need to run the occasional Windows apps - wine works for many of them.

AND Wine keeps improving. I had to do a couple of save hacks to take some PS1 saves from my PS1 memory card on my PS2 (via uLaunchElf) to my PC and then to my PSP, and to my pleasant suprise every Windows app I needed to do this worked perfectly in Wine. I'm aware that some of the more complex apps still don't work, but command line and simple gui programs work great.

Communication with her friends and overseas family members via E-Mail -> KMail

Printing recipes and E-Government stuff

Gaming, mostly card games

In a way my granny is a lot more platform-independent than I am. She doesn't care if it's called C: or/, has no interest in new features of new versions... IMHO the main reason for grannies Debian stable;)

About a year with Windows XP led to a bigger amount of "family support cases", now it's the second year with Debian and it just runs - but ok, she doesn't have to dist-upgrade on her own, just the updates. But she wouldn't install a new version of Windows on her own either.

But you'll never know if your granny likes it until she tries it for herself.

Well if you were to give my Grandmother a Windows disc she would just be as baffled by it. I assume the same would happen if you gave her a Mac. For people who have never used any operating system it would be just as difficult for them to understand any OS you could give them.

I'm sorry, but the reality is that Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness.--Okay, I'm a little grumpy this morning (it's early), so sorry folks...

How is using Wine simpler than just using windows?--Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to spend a few minute setting up wine than buying and installing windows onto another partition to run a couple old windows programs that somebody wants me to use.

Why bother emulating it when it comes standard on most pre-built systems that the majority of computer illiterate will be purchasing?--Because my system isn't pre-built, and I'm not computer illiterate.

Its pointless for those kinds of people. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see ANY OS properly compete with Windows, but I don't see it happening. What will the computer illiterates do with their computer?--The same as they're doing today. Not much. The "choice" of OS and GUI have no bearing on someone who doesn't care. They managed (when they were forced to) with DOS, they'll be in the same boat with any future OS.

I'm willing to bet its gaming, word processing (possibly some other apps that come in Office), surfing and chatting, and playing media.--I'm willing to bet it's probably not even that. True computer phobics will go to familiar programs, have other people set up things and show them how to activate them. As long as someone is there to help and show them how to do the handful of things they need, they'll use any OS. I'd hazard a guess that Linux's myriad of configuration options might offer such people a better experience. Instead of trying to force people into MS's view of user interaction, Linux will work as configured, and won't scare them with "your subscription is about to expire!", "your anti-virus is out of date!", etc.

Yeah its wonderful that Linux is a very secure OS, but its too bad it doesnt play any games.--You mean games, as in the popular ones that lots of people buy that are typically ported to Linux? Or do you mean the kind of games MS plays with their users?

Games for Windows, no matter how much I despise it, will bring make it even more simple for those who want to game on a PC but have trouble setting up in the current PC gaming world. Windows is on top and it is folly to think its up top without a reason.--It's folly to base your opinion on one aspect of anything. You're obviously a gamer, and some of your choice games aren't made for Linux. Personally, I'm not into running on the gaming treadmill. I'd like to know a game is good before I spend my cash on it. A key to this decision is to see that gamers like it enough to request a Linux version.

--As you can see, this is all subjective. MS Windows works for you, Linux works for me. Blanket statements either way are useless. However, my choice is a lot cheaper to implement...leaving me with more money for games.:)

I'm sorry, but the reality is that Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness.

You hear a lot of people saying this and I just don't think it's true. I've recently acquired a laptop for my mother (that's a good swap - stop it!) and she has never used a computer of any sort. Well, Windows is the obvious choice as it's so intuitive and user friendly says I. This is a myth that is cleverly enforced by the whole Windows GUI "Style Guide" meaning that most Windows apps have a similar

The problem isn't just whether linux is a user friendly OS. the apps must also be user friendly and better than the best Windows apps in order to convince people to drop Windows. That is why I think it is more important to work on replacing their apps with Windows apps that are better and also run on linux. It's very unrealistic to get most people to switch OS but apps are easier. Games...ok that is a big problem but you should still be able to get your work done no matter what OS-that's a realistic but cha

I don't remember signing any contract with a utility company. I do remember signing a contract with Sprint, but that was now 8 years ago. Utility, like electricity or water - I seriously doubt. They don't even want an official contract, it's too much hassle. I think I just called them, and if they wanted a deposit I probably just paid with a credit card, right there. This "contract" is also legal and binding.

In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.

You're missing the point of what DRM in Vista is for.It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.

The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to pla

Which apps specifically are you referring to that will not run in either OS X or Linux?

The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.

In OS X you can run parallels but 99% of the Windows apps I use are available for OS X (for example, Office, Photoshop, Flash Studio, Quickbooks, Firefox, etc). Linux is a different story. That being said I have great luck running wine with photoshop and quickbooks. I've never tried flash but it's not needed. Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for MS Office. I don't use the extra 95% of tools available in those products anyway.

I like windows actually. I however love OS X. Linux is great as well. I cut my teeth using Linux in '95 while in college trying to get on doing Oracle DB development on HP-UX. I needed to be able to get around the shell and learn csh. Programming dot clocks to get your "new" video card to start X windows was an interesting learning experience. I'm forever amazed at the new distributions. Ubuntu (sp?), Fedora, etc. Ah the good old days of Slackware disk packages downloaded over ftp at the local Uni!

Tru64, Solaris (SunOS), hell even DR/MS-DOS in the days. Oh yeah Integer Basic on Apple ][ was great! Mac OS was pretty nice too, I was a bit sad to see OS 9 die. My first Mac with OS 9 & X dual boot made me see why so many people were into pre-OS X. 10.0 & 10.1 sucked IMO. However, 10.2 made my system exponentially faster, 10.3 sped it up even more, 10.4 was not such a drastic improvement, leading me to believe the OS is more mature now. I'd like to see that from an OS from Redmond. Windows gets massively larger per OS update. Granted Linux has as well. It however, includes almost 100% of what you need for an operational system. Windows just includes notepad;)

Ehhhh...my onboard Intel Pro 10/100 (e100 on Linux, for many years) doesn't work without Dell's drivers on XP SP2. I think it finally works on Vista, some four years and a major OS version after the PC was made. On a newer computer, the XP installer doesn't work if I run my SATA drives in AHCI mode (surprise, runs fine on recent Linux kernels). If you look at default compatibility with modern hardware, Linux is way ahead of Windows. Linux fails on a tiny subset of just-released hardware that require their own drivers, and hardware where the vendor has threatened legal action (ie: Broadcom wireless adapters, until recently).

XML was designed for one thing, blind data interchange. That's it. Not config files, not GUI descriptions, not anything to do with databases. Get over it. Everything else is hype created by idiots that make money selling ads in magazines and on web sites.

OpenSolaris hasn't been big enough to experience fragmentation yet, so you can't judge how well OpenSolaris will hold up at scale of development community, and from my work with it, for it to be anything close to edging out linux, it has a way to go in the day-to-day stuff that *needs* a larger community. When it has a large community and *still* doesn't get into debates and doesn't have forks, let me know. It's interesting to note that in spite of the well-publicized debates and forks which all pull from

Well, I've already replied to one of your posts tonight--why not make a pair?"OpenSolaris hasn't been big enough to experience fragmentation yet, so you can't judge how well OpenSolaris will hold up at scale of development community..."

This is entirely accurate. However, I'm inclined to believe that fragmentation will be less of a factor for OpenSolaris, due to the fact that it ultimately feeds back into a single definitive snapshot. Solaris will always be the watermark for OpenSolaris, so as new projects g

Not to be rude, but no one cares about your (or my, for that matter - I really like KDE a lot) desktop. Linux is known as a server OS in the corporate world, period, and that's what OpenSolaris will supposedly replace. Who knows. But the desktop "market" is absolutely fringe by comparison, and I don't really think it's on anybody's radar aside from a few experimenters and cash-strapped early adopters.

Most of which is on a par with George Bush pulling out of Iraq...as in, no way, Jose.I agree, OpenSolaris exceeding Linux in the marketplace is a non-starter from Day One. Never happen. I have no serious complaints about Sun OS's, never having used one, but the idea that an OS released in the last year or so (as OSS, regardless of its past history) is going to overtake the hundreds of thousands of people working on and with Linux in the Linux community is just a stupid concept.